I endeavoured to upgrade my old FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE system to brand new 10.1. As expected, this was a quite bumpy process, and below are a few things I had to find out the hard way.

Ports

Neither pkg update nor portupgrade can update all ports. I had to dump all origins, remove all ports, then reinstall everything manually.

Linuxulator

New CentOS-6 based linux_base requires sysctl:

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compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.18

X11

New Xorg

As of Apr. 16, 2014, the X server has been upgraded to a new release. From https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/WITH_NEW_XORG:

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Note that there's a know regression with syscons and kernel video
drivers: you can't switch back to a console once an X.Org session is
started. A new console driver called vt(4) fixes this issue while
bringing nice features. It's available in FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE and
10.1-RELEASE but isn't enabled by default. To enable it, put the
following line in your /boot/loader.conf:
    kern.vty=vt

It is a real shame that users essentially have no choice but switching from the default syscons to the “new” (unfinished, far from functionally complete) vt console driver.

The X mouse cursor occasionnally disappears for some unidentified reason. Alt-Tab brings it back.

DRI

Both GDM and the GNOME desktop now require DRI access. At least for ATI video cards, this means that user gdm, as well as anyone logging in to a GNOME session, must have access to /dev/dri/card0:

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add path 'dri/card0 mode 0666

GDM

Gdm won’t work out of the box (black screen): gdm_lang cannot be set to a non-UTF-8 locale anymore (if the month name in the current date contains an accent, the greeter will abort). Time to bite the UTF-8 bullet, then.

Oh, and I can’t just remove the variable altogether, see below.

Keymap

Interesting issue for GNOME users. I found out that the GDM login screen would always revert to US layout, no matter what. Initially I thought the X server had an incorrect keymap due to HAL device enumeration, so I added the following to my setup:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">fr</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,compose:rctrl</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">fr</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.options" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,compose:rctrl</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

<!-- Legacy X11 options:
  Option  "XkbRules"    "xorg"
  Option  "XkbModel"    "pc105"
  Option  "XkbLayout"   "fr"
  Option  "XkbOptions"  "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp" 
  Option  "XkbOptions"  "compose:rctrl" 
  -->

However this happened to be a total red herring, as by default the port configures Xorg to use devd, not HAL. For devd, I found out this is achieved using xorg.conf options:

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Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Keyboard Defauls"
        Driver "keyboard"
        MatchIsKeyboard "on"
        Option "XkbLayout" "fr"
EndSection

But all of this was mostly irrelevant for my setup since I add AutoAddDevices turned off in the X server setup, and the correct layout was hardcoded in xorg.conf. And indeed, starting it with startx yields the expected French layout.

However, it appears that gnome-shell considers that whatever keymap is configured in the X server probably must be unsuitable, and changes it on its own to a better default based on the current locale (or “us” if no locale is set for gdm).

Printing

I am using an HP MFP1217nfw network printer, which requires the proprietary print/hplip and print/hplip-plugin packages. These install print/cups as a dependency. print/cups-filters is not installed as a dependency, but is required anyway, or all print operations will fail with:

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D [02/Mar/2015:22:24:01 +0100] Print-Job client-error-document-format-not-supported: Unsupported format "application/pdf".

Objective

To set up Octopress in its own, isolated Ruby environment

Prerequisite

Install rbenv to manage Ruby virtual environments.

Create isolated environment:

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$ export GEM_HOME=$HOME/octopress.gems
$ gem install bundler
$ export PATH=$GEM_HOME/bin:$PATH

GEM_HOME and PATH need to be set to do any Octopress work.

Clone Octopress:

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$ git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress
$ cd octopress 

Install dependencies and default theme:

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$ bundle install
$ rake install

If --path is passed to bundle install, the value is cached in .bundle/config, and $GEM_HOME is subsequently ignored.

Emoji support

• Plugin: https://github.com/chriskempson/jekyll-emoji It is actually necessary to add gemoji to the Gemfile
• Images: https://github.com/arvida/emoji-cheat-sheet.com
• `ln -s …/emoji-cheat-sheet.com/public/graphics/emogis source/images/

The testing ISO image works on a USB key.

Using the nvidia (non-free) driver

To install the nVidia driver:

• make sure installed kernel headers (linux-headers) match kernel (linux-image), otherwise DKMS won’t build.
• install nvidia-driver (note: this will build a kernel module, so requires a working compiler)
• run nvidia-xconfig --query-gpu-info by hand and make note of PCI BusID
• run nvidia-xconfig --busid=PCI:x:x:x to generate xorg.conf

BIOS setup

• Video -> Switchable graphics -> uncheck Enable Switchable Graphics

GNOME 3

Disable gnome-keyring:

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$ cd /etc/xdg/autostart
$ mv gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop-
$ mv gnome-keyring-gpg.desktop gnome-keyring-gpg.desktop-

Remember NumLock state:

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$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.keyboard remember-numlock-state true

Support for smart-card reader

apt-get install pcscd

Network

Disable IPv6 Privacy Extensions

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# Disable IPv6 "Privacy extensions" (random SLAAC addresses)
net.ipv6.conf.all.use_tempaddr=0
net.ipv6.conf.default.use_tempaddr=0